Russian-Turkmen Encounters

The Caspian Frontier before the Great Game

S. Peter Poullada, Claora E. Styron

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781784537012
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786722348
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

In the mid-eighteenth century the Russian tsar sent two expeditions across the Caspian Sea in response to an extraordinary plea for assistance from the recently subjugated Kalmyk Khan. The official journals of these expeditions, here translated into English for the first time, record the encounters of Captains Tebelev and Kopitovskii (in 1741 and 1745, respectively) with the Turkmen tribes of the Caspian frontier zone. Together they form the basis for Peter Poullada's study of the relationship between the expanding Russian empire and the tribal peoples of Central Asia over a period of more than 200 years. Drawing on Russian archival sources and Persian and Uzbek chronicles, Russian-Turkmen Encounters provides a detailed exploration of the historical and political context of the encounters so vividly described in the two journals. Poullada shows that before the better-known nineteenth-century rivalry between the Russian and British Empires, famously known as the Great Game, Russian merchants, envoys and explorers were engaged in a complex relationship with the various tribal and political groups of Central Asia: Turkmen, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Kalmyks and even forces from the Safavid and Afshar shahs who ruled Iran. Russian-Turkmen Encounters provides a valuable new resource that will lead to a deeper understanding of Russia's imperial expansion and its involvement in the geopolitical and commercial rivalries with the major political groups in Central Asia during the early modern period.

PART I

RUSSIAN–TURKMEN FRONTIER ENCOUNTERS: 1558–1745

Herkes Ozige Sultandir,
Khan u Sultan gerekmes.

Every man is his own Sultan,
Khans and Sultans are not needed.

Makhtumquli Khan Goklen (1732–90), National Poet of Turkmenistan

The elders replied, [A]s for our people, we'll never quieten them down as there is neither khan nor sultan over us and all the people are free.

From the journal of Captain G. Tebelev (1741)

CHAPTER 1

THE KHAN'S LETTER

In February 1741, Donduk Omba Khan, grandson of Ayuki Khan and ruler of the Kalmyk ulus (domain or realm), which extended across the northern plains of the Caspian steppe from the Volga River to the Emba River, wrote a letter to the Russian cabinet minister Count Andrei Osterman.¹ In his message, the Khan described a series of events that signalled a transformation of the political alignments in the Caspian and Central Asian regions. In particular, he expressed his concern about the fate of a large Turkmen tribal grouping that previously had fled their yurts (pasturelands) along the Caspian coast and found refuge along the banks of the Amu Darya (Oxus River) in the regions of Khorezm and Bukhara. Now, however, these Turkmen were threatened by the military campaigns of Nadir Shah Afshar in Central Asia. In his letter, Donduk Omba wrote:

the Turkmen, who formerly [byvshie] had obligations to my father and grandfather and were subordinate [poddanstvo] to them, quarrelled among themselves and fell apart, and at that time the Kirghiz-Kazkah [Kazakhs] attacked them and ravaged many of them, and those who remained were no longer able to live in that place and went away to Khiva [Khorezm]. And now I have received from my former people in Khiva the news that last autumn [1740] at the time of the capture of Bukhara and Khiva by the Persian Khan Tahmasp [Nadir Shah Afshar], the former Turkmen came from Badakhshan and Bukhara, all of them, and having joined together with our Turkmen and wanting to live in their old locales and join us, they crossed into Mangyshlak […] The above-mentioned people of mine [the Turkmen] who were formerly in Khiva said that the Persians captured Bukhara in August [1740] and conquered Khiva on September 4th and they left Khiva that same September on the 10th, and they heard from the Turkmen that those from the Balkhans [Bukhara?] and from Badakhshan had come together and migrated away in 300,000 kibitkas [nomads' tents] and had already arrived at the front [western promontory?] of the Mangyshlak region. And they, my Turkmen people, have set up their tents with them in the area of Khashat.²

Donduk Omba's primary motivation for writing the letter was not simply to inform Count Osterman of these dramatic events, but to make a highly significant request:

Then they ordered my people [Turkmen?] to greet me and then to announce to me that when they had chosen a good place to live, they would send an eminent notable to me with notification, just as though I was their master, so I could petition on their behalf to His Imperial Majesty [Tsar Ivan VI] in order that four hundred to five hundred ships with flour [rye?] for sale to be sent to them. For they are not nomadic and are accustomed to grain and where no grain grows, they cannot live [emphasis added]. And it would be good for an ukaz [decree] to be sent to Astrakhan in order that merchants be sent to help them this spring at the opening of the ice [on the Caspian Sea].

Donduk Omba's letter, preserved in the Turkmen File of the Russian State Archives and published in RTO, merits detailed study. It exemplifies many of the challenges scholars face when interpreting primary sources that deal with relations between the Russian State and the tribal, nomadic peoples of Inner Asia. One of the key issues that such a document raises, for example, is the question of the language in which it was originally written. Most likely, the chancery in Astrakhan translated the text into Russian from one of the Turkish lingua francas that were in use throughout Inner Asia at the time, with the result that an unknown number of Russifications and other modifications were probably introduced. In addition, terms such as ‘poddanstvo’ must be carefully analysed in the context of what we know about the relations between the Kalmyks, the Russians and the other tribal peoples of Inner and Central Asia in the eighteenth century.³

While all of these issues are worth pursuing further, they would distract from the primary purpose of this study. Donduk Omba's letter serves here simply as an introduction to the larger topic of Russian relations with the Turkmen of Mangyshlak. Specifically, it is an excellent place to start our discussion of the historical background to the travel journals of Captains Tebelev and Kopytovskii. For, later that summer, it was in direct response to Donduk Omba's request for assistance that the Russian State dispatched the expedition that is so fascinatingly described in Tebelev's journal. Furthermore, all of those who feature prominently in the journals – the various Mangyshlak Turkmen tribal groups, the Kazakhs, the Kalmyks, Nadir Shah and his Qizilbash (tribal supporters), and even the Uzbeks of Khorezm and Bukhara – are mentioned in his letter. The interactions of these parties, and, in particular, their relations with the Russians, form the basis for the chapters that follow.

CHAPTER 2

ASTRAKHAN, THE TURKMEN OF MANGYSHLAK AND THE LONG-DISTANCE CARAVAN TRADE

For over 200 years, from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century, the principal point of contact between the expanding Russian Empire and the Turkmen tribal nomads lay in the Transcaspian region, along the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea, primarily on the promontories of Mangyshlak and Buzachi, but also extending as far south as the Abu'l Khan (Balkhan) Mountains.¹ Intimately connected to these imperial borderlands was the important regional entrepôt and administrative centre of Astrakhan, known to the Muslim peoples of Inner Asia as Hajji Tarkhan.² Located in the delta of the Volga River, approximately 75 kilometres from the Caspian Sea, Astrakhan was one of the most important urban centres of the ulus of Jochi, the thirteenth-to-sixteenth-century Turko-Mongol realm commonly known in both Russia and the West as the ‘Golden Horde’.³

In the centuries following the disintegration of the Mongol Empire in the mid-fourteenth century, Astrakhan served as Europe's window on to the Inner Asian world and, conversely, as the principal terminus for the long-distance trade routes that crossed the steppes and brought goods from India, China and Central Asia to Eastern Europe. It was the conquest of Astrakhan by Muscovy in 1556 that transformed Russia into a Eurasian power and brought it into intimate political contact with the tribal peoples of the steppes as well as the oases and urban states of Muslim Central Asia. With the establishment of Muscovite rule in Astrakhan, the Russians also forged direct commercial relations with the merchants and steppe-dwelling intermediaries who played a major role in the long-distance caravan trade that linked the Volga Delta with Urgench and Khiva in Khorezm, Bukhara and the ancient trading communities of India and China.⁴

Soon after the Russian conquest, Astrakhan boasted numerous specialized hostels and caravanserais (known in the Russian sources as gostinyi dvor), which were dedicated to serving the Eurasian merchant communities and helped to make the city a truly cosmopolitan metropolis.⁵ For the next 200 years, Astrakhan served as the principal Russian frontier outpost, not just for merchants, but for explorers, diplomatic envoys and military expeditions to the khanates of Central Asia and Safavid Persia. Moreover, as the main terminus of highly important north–south caravan routes from India through Bukhara and the region of Khorezm, the city played a central role in the development of Russian commercial interactions with the steppe peoples of Inner Asia. Many of the latter, such as the Turkmen of Mangyshlak, acted as both useful intermediaries and fearsome pillagers of the caravans. Russia's political relations with the neighbouring tribal steppe powers were also conducted from Astrakhan, at least until the second half of the eighteenth century, when Orenburg began to take a more prominent role in the rapidly developing Russian Empire.

Over the course of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Astrakhan's merchants and administrators dealt with a succession of tribal nomadic powers: first the Noghays of the Manghit ulus; then the Kalmyks and Kazakhs; and finally their nomadic neighbours to the south, the Turkmen of Mangyshlak. However, in contrast to the Noghays and the Kalmyks, the Turkmen never posed a direct, military threat to the imperial outpost. Indeed, the relationship between Russia and the Turkmen was almost exclusively commercial. Even later, after the rise of Orenburg (founded in 1735 but in its present location since 1744), Astrakhan remained an administrative centre for the Caspian region, as well as the principal entrepôt for trading networks that extended to Persia, Central Asia and India.⁶ Thus, well into the nineteenth century, Astrakhan's merchants and government officials continued to have extensive and regular dealings with the native peoples of the steppes, including the Mangyshlak Turkmen.

The city's role as the pre-eminent Russian window to the East from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century is evident in the two journals that appear in Part II of this book. Captains Tebelev and Kopytovskii are representatives of the Tsar, and their missions reflect the continuation of official Russian policy towards the Turkmen and other native peoples that was established in the period of imperial expansion during the reign of Peter the Great. Their journals also reveal Astrakhan's long-standing commercial ties to both Central Asia and the Turkmen tribes of Mangyshlak.

Before analysing the dramatic events that prompted Donduk Omba Khan's letter and the subsequent missions of Tebelev and Kopytovskii in greater detail, it is worth reviewing the earlier history of Astrakhan's relations with the Turkmen. In addition to the Turkmen, the other groups mentioned in both the Khan's letter and the captains' journals – the Uzbeks, Kalmyks, Kazakhs and Persians, all of whom played vital roles in the frontier encounters described in the journals – need to be examined in the context of their relations with the expanding Russian Empire. Accordingly, we will first outline Astrakhan's relations with the Turkmen from 1556 to 1740, then discuss the complex, tripartite dynamic that developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries among the Turkmen of Mangyshlak, the Uzbeks of Khorezm and the Russians of Astrakhan. Next, we offer a brief appraisal of relations among the Turkmen, Kalmyks and Kazakhs before turning finally to the collapse of Safavid rule in Persia, Nadir Afshar's rise to power and his military campaigns into Central Asia in the 1730s and 1740s. The fact that the military campaigns of the self-proclaimed ‘Nadir Shah’ – originally an Afshar Turkmen from northern Khurasan – could trigger a petition from the Kalmyks to a senior Russian official, which in turn led to the dispatch of two official missions, vividly demonstrates the interconnectedness of political affairs in mid-eighteenth-century Central Asia. First, though, if we are to appreciate all of the linkages among the parties listed above, we must go back to the mid-sixteenth century, wherein lie the origins of the complex interactions among the Russians, the Turkmen, the other steppe peoples and various other regional powers.

Historical accounts of Russian–Turkmen relations tend to begin with a discussion of Peter the Great's policies towards the East and especially his sponsorship of several scientific explorations of the Caspian Sea and related military expeditions into Transcaspia and Khorezm.⁷ Specifically, the disastrous military campaign of Prince Bekovich-Cherkasskii in 1716–17 often serves as the opening chapter in studies of the relations between Russia and the Turkmen. Without minimizing the importance of these events and their influence on later Russian policies towards Central Asia, we feel that an examination of earlier contacts between Russia and the Mangyshlak Turkmen is not only useful but essential.

A strong case can be made that the genesis of the Russian frontier relationship with the Turkmen dates back to Tsar Ivan IV's mid-sixteenth-century conquest of Astrakhan. Russia's first contacts with the Turkmen of Mangyshlak – and with their regional overlords, the Uzbeks of the khanate of Khiva – appear to have resulted from the commercial operations of the long-distance caravan trade, whose terminus was in Astrakhan. There is little documentary evidence that Turkmen acted as intermediaries in this trade or that Russia had any contact with them prior to Ivan IV's conquest of Astrakhan in 1556. Moreover, we may only speculate about the extent of contact between the merchants of Astrakhan and the nomads of the Transcaspian region prior to that date. Unfortunately, accounts of the journey between Khorezm and Astrakhan in the fourteenth century and the beginning of the fifteenth, such as those of Ibn Battuta and Ibn Arabshah, do not provide any evidence of contact with the Turkmen. This may have been because the route they followed was the traditional one that skirted to the east of the Mangyshlak and Buzachi peninsulas.⁸

Notwithstanding the lack of documentary evidence, there is little doubt that by the mid-sixteenth century Astrakhan had well-established connections with a network of merchant communities across Eurasia along the east–west and north–south trade routes that linked Europe, China and India. It is less clear when the city's merchants began to use the sea route across the Caspian and on to landings on the Mangyshlak Peninsula, where the Turkmen would have acted as intermediaries.⁹ Perhaps the extension of Russian power to the Volga Delta facilitated the opening up of this sea route. Unfortunately, we know relatively little about sea-borne trade on the Caspian, despite evidence in the following centuries of extensive maritime trade with Persia and even tales of pirates attacking the lucrative silk trade. Certainly, though, the direct silk trade between Muscovy and Safavid Persia began after the conquest of Astrakhan.¹⁰

As mentioned above, Astrakhan's pivotal role in these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century trading activities is testified by the presence of gostinyi dvor in the city. The authorities assigned these hostels to members of several important Eurasian merchant communities, including the Bukharans and the Khorezmians, who were collectively known as teziki (Tajiks). There were also Persians from the silk-producing Caspian province of Gilan, several different groups of Indian merchants and later, in the eighteenth century, Afghans, who specialized in long-distance horse trading, perhaps the most lucrative caravan trade of all.¹¹ Interestingly, the Armenians' hostel was located in a prime position within the city walls, perhaps because they were Christians, or because they enjoyed a monopoly in the prestigious silk trade with Persia in the early seventeenth century. The gostinyi dvor were used as commercial depots and as residences for the official diplomatic envoys, who were usually active traders as well as ambassadors, and often spies. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the hostels also served the Russian State by administering taxation and controlling the various merchant communities.¹²

There has been little research into the extent to which Turkmen formed part of Astrakhan's registered merchant community or if they were allocated one of the city's gostinyi dvor in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If they visited the city in this period, most likely they participated in its commercial life as guests of other Central Asian merchant communities. By the reign of Peter the Great, there is evidence that Turkmen elders – referred to in Russian as starshin – were important members of Uzbek missions from the khans of Khiva that presented petitions to the voevoda of Astrakhan, and in 1741 Tebelev suggests that they were regular visitors to the city.¹³ However, two critical questions remain regarding the commercial relations between Astrakhan and the Turkmen before ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Maps and Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Transliteration
• Preface
• Part I Russian–Turkmen Frontier Encounters: 1558–1745
• Part II The Journals of Captain Tebelev (1741) and Captain Kopytovskii (1745)
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Plates
• Back Cover